She realized he must have said something to Weldon just now which she
hadn't heard. Weldon's head was nodding in agreement. Dr. Lowry shifted
back to the table, said, "Botucato, Brazil--an untried location. How
the pinpointing of these random samplings is brought about is of
course...." His voice dropped to an indistinct murmur as he reached out
to the projector again.
Arlene roused herself with an effort partly out of her foggy fears.
It was almost like trying to awake from a heavy, uncomfortable
sleep. But now there was also some feeling of relief--and angry
self-contempt--because obviously while she had been giving in to her
emotional reactions, nothing disastrous had in fact occurred! At the
table, they'd moved on several steps in the standard testing procedure.
She hadn't even been aware of it. She was behaving like a fool!
The sensory color patterns were gone from the viewplate, and now as she
looked, the green-patterned white field of the projector's location map
appeared there instead. She watched Dr. Lowry's practiced fingers spin
the coordinating dials, and layer after layer of the map came surging
into view, each a magnified section of the preceding one. There was a
faint click. Lowry released the dials, murmured something again, ended
more audibly, "... twenty-mile radius." The viewplate had gone blank,
but Arlene continued to watch it.
The projector was directed now towards a twenty-mile circle at ground
level somewhere in Brazil. None of their established contacts were
in that area. Nevertheless, something quite definite was occuring.
Dr. Lowry had not expected to learn much more about this particular
process until a disciplined telepathic mind was operating through the
instrument--and perhaps not too much more then. But in some manner the
diex energy was now probing the area, and presently it would touch a
human mind--sometimes a succession of them, sometimes only one. It was
always the lightest of contacts. The subjects remained patently unaware
of any unusual experience, and the only thing reflected from them was
the familiar generalized flux of sensory impressions--
* * * * *
Arlene Rolf realized she was standing just inside the open records
vault of Dr. Lowry's office, with a bundle of files in her arms. On the
floor about her was a tumbled disorder of other files, of scattered
papers, tapes. She dropped the bundle on the litter, turned back to
the door. And only then, with a churning rush of hot terror, came the
thought, _What am I doing here? What happened?_
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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